Position in chronology
MDP 17, 197
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE — and belonging to one of the very earliest layers of human writing. The text is proto-Elamite or proto-cuneiform in character: a tally or accounting record listing commodities or categories alongside numerical notations, the kind of bureaucratic record-keeping that was the original purpose of writing itself. Most of the signs remain undeciphered, so we can see the structure of the accounting — commodities, counts, perhaps a heading — but cannot name what is being counted. This tablet is held in the Louvre as part of the Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse (MDP) collection, excavated at Susa in the late 19th or early 20th century.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads as a short ledger entry: one line records a category or commodity sign followed by a count of roughly '2 plus 1 large unit'; the next lines are too damaged to read in full. A middle line records a compound sign grouping, possibly a heading or category label, with a sub-entry of 1 unit. Further entries follow with additional commodity signs and presumably quantities, but the tablet breaks off before they can be completed. The rest is lost or illegible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineM387~ef [commodity/category sign], 2(N01) 1(N24)[?] x [...] , [...] [...] x |M131+M388| M263~a M218[?] , 1(N01) M218 M219 M057~e [...] , [...] x x , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M387~ef , 2(N01)# 1(N24)# x [...] , [...] [...] x |M131+M388| M263~a M218# , 1(N01) M218 M219 M057~e [...] , [...] x x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 197. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008395) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.